The Top 11 Science Stories of 2011 for Christians/Creationists by Chris Parker Last year we published The Top 12 Science Stories of 2010 for Christians and Creationists on January 7th so this doesn’t 2011 roundup is not that late after all.. These stories are the ones that strike us as having been the most interesting, the most impactful in terms of the evolution creation debate or because we didn’t want to rename this article the Top 7 Science Stories of 2011 for Christians/Creationists. This year we’ve only selected 11 stories but remember; we’re in a recession. Our selections are printed here in no particular order. 1)Science Keeps on Marching Backward: Science ‘Walks Back Some Dubious Claims in 2011 In 2009 and 2010 Ardi and Ida were both effectively debunked as human ancestors within six to eight months of their worldwide discovery announcements, setting new records “for scientists had previously thought” reversals. In terms of past dubious claims, it had taken NASA 11 years to march back from its 1976 alleged alien life on a meteorite discovery. On Friday, March 4th of last year NASA had another opportunity to march science backward with “alien claims”. Nasa scientist Richard Hoover published a peer reviewed article in the Journal “Cosmology” with the claim that that he had found tiny fossils of alien life in the remnants of a meteorite. This story was published internationally under headlines like: “NASA Scientist Finds ‘Alien Life’ Fossils”. Naturally, the NASA connection seemingly provided some support to the alien claim which was met with excitement-and skepticism.Hold that thought for a minute before; the rest of the story. In another area of scientific dubiousity; “Twenty years ago the paleontological community gasped as geoscientists revealed evidence for the oldest bacterial fossils on the planet.”..naturenews The evidence here was a piece of rock found in Australia known as the Apex Chert and it contained it was said evidence of the earliest life on earth. Scientists declared that the Apex Chert was 3.5 billion years old, whereas Genesis would set its maximum age at 10,000 years or less. Late last year there was a development re the Apex Chert as described by this headline: “Whoops! Scientists left red-faced as oldest ‘evidence of life’ turns out to be iron deposits.” Whoops indeed. And what about all those evolution adherents who had snootily quoted this “fact” to non-evolution believers for twenty years? This ‘scientists had previously thought” item took even longer than the 1976 NASA “discovery” to reverse. Getting back to NASA scientist Richard Hoover’s “alien life fossils”. They were announced on a Friday and disavowed by “top scientists in different disciplines”, including NASA by the following Monday, by noon, setting new standards for scientists had previously thought type reversals. No alien fossils and quite probably no bacterial fossils. Finally there were the international headlines about the “God Particle”. Science it was said was very close to discovering the “God Particle”, which is a major tenet of materialist beliefs about the creation of the universe is a supposed fundamental particle responsible for the creation of the mass of the universe’s mass. Two weeks after the banner headlines about the closeness the world of science was to the discovery we learn in less banner headlines that the particle may not exist. What doesn’t exist any more are the billions of tax dollars that went into the construction of the giant CERN particle accelerator in Geneva. 2) A 2011 Gallop poll indicates that 92% of Americans affirm a belief in God. A surprise; Atheists are more likely to live on the East Coast than the West Coast. Apparently, one of the un-cleverest things that a presidential candidate could utter these days is that they believe that Genesis is the literal story of how the universe was created and that they personally believe that man and dinosaur co-existed. Even the Republican candidates would be hard pressed to say that publicly even if they’re trying to win South Carolina. So, the Atheists and evolutionists must be winning, right? Not so fast. “A poll released by Gallup yesterday confirmed what a deeply religious America continues to be 92 percent of Americans still say “yes” when asked the basic question “Do you believe in God?” In 1947, this number was 94 percent. Considering the events over the past 60 years, this is a remarkably stable statistic to say the least. Gallup notes that in particular, the belief in God is high across all subgroups of the population, but there are variances. Women are more likely to believe in God than men. Liberals are less likely to believe than conservatives. Young people are the least likely to believe. Those with a post-graduate education are less likely to believe than high school or college graduates. Finally, East Coast Americans are the least likely to believe in God, and Southerners are the most, with the West and the Midwest coming in equally in between. But how do we stack up against other countries? A 2008 Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey reveal that only 1 in 4 of our neighbors up north believe in God. And a 2005 Eurostat poll indicated that the French, perhaps our cultural opposite, had the highest atheism in Europe — 33% responded that they believed in “neither a Spirit, God, or life force.” Here is the breakdown of the Gallup poll for U.S. adults.” (Photo at article end0 In concert with these poll findings other recent polls continue to show that Atheists are the most distrusted group in America although Muslims and Scientologists have made up some ground. Elsewhere: University of Minnesota Study on “American Attitudes Towards Atheists & Atheism” Finds that Atheists are Most Despised, Most Distrusted Minority.. The findings indicate that Americans are least likely to vote for an Atheist for President than any other group. What would happen if a Christian acknowledging that he believed in a literal reading of Genesis ran against an Atheist? 3) Darwinists Alarmed at Teachers’ Caution Over Evolution Jan 29, 2011 — “Creationism” refuses to die in American high schools. Two researchers at the University of Pennsylvania sounded the alarm in Science, with suggestions for what to do about it. The only suggestion off the table was to have debates about the evidence; no, that was completely out of the question: the report was focused on “Defeating Creationism.” Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer, professors of political science at U Penn, surveyed a “national representative probability sample” of 926 high school biology teachers about their teaching of evolution. Only about 28% of the respondents consistently teach evolution “unabashedly”. The rest are either bashful or unabashedly “creationist” when teaching the subject of origins, the survey found. 13% of the teachers “explicitly advocate creationism or intelligent design by spending at least 1 hour of class time presenting it in a positive light (an additional 5% of teachers report that they endorse creationism in passing or when answering student questions).” This sounds like a very small amount of time to worry about in a semester-long course, but Berkman and Plutzer’s alarm was palpable: “The boldness and confidence of this minority should not be underestimated.” Of greater concern, however, (to evolutionists) “the cautious 60%” who sit on the fence to avoid controversy. Some of them avoid the topic, or just teach to the test, or teach various views to let the students make up their own minds. Few of the fence-sitters are advocates of young-earth creationism, which Berkman and Plutzer said “would prevent them from becoming strong advocates for evolutionary biology.” The authors worry that many students, who will take biology as their only science course, will fail to hear from these cautious teachers the “evidence that evolution has occurred,” and that instruction in evolution will be “absent, cursory, or fraught with misinformation” in American high schools. They worry about a “cycle of ignorance” in many communities, especially the “socially conservative” communities, where more of the “creationist” and “cautious” teachers tend to reside. The cycle must be broken to prevent a “systematic undermining of science.” Source: The fantastic CreationEvolutionHeadlines 4) Peer reviewed scientific paper claims that the geological time scale could be off as much as 99%. Guy Berthault, the author of the study is a graduate of The Ecole Polytechnique, France, and a member of the International Association of Sedimentologists and lives in Paris, France. The article is entitled “Analysis of the Main Principles of Stratigraphy on the Basis of Experimental Data”, and although it reaches some startling conclusions it’s caused barely a ripple in the millions of years geological continuum. They are walking by faith and not by sight (or site) so that mere evidence is not going to impact them. “When I started my experiments on strata formation I was surprised to find how little work had been done on the subject in the past. Of course, sediments had been examined and flume experiments performed in connection with building and other projects, but none with the object of explaining the mechanics of stratification. I searched the data banks but found little to help with my research. I began to realize that the basic principles of superposition, continuity and initial horizontality laid down in the seventeenth century had been accepted, albeit with developments, virtually without question. There seemed to have been little attempt to examine the actual mechanics involved. Yet a few simple experiments, first with laminae and later with strata revealed that the time needed for micro or macro strata formation was of quite a different order to that generally accepted. The implications were far-reaching both as concerns the geological time-scale and the fossil record.” Source: Author’s Site 5) Archaeopteryx Feathers will fly: Archaeopteryx relegated. Reclassification Raises Fear of Creationists July 28, 2011 by Steve Drury |EARTH PAGES “This year, 2011, is the 150th anniversary of the first Archaeopteryx specimen being unearthed from the famous Solnhofen limestone lagerstätte. With its feathered, lizard-like tail; two-clawed, stubby wings; a bill-shaped muzzle with teeth but no keratin coating; feet capable of perching and unlike those of small dinosaurs; a ‘wishbone’ and lightweight bones, Archaeopteryx was just the half-and-half missing link in the fossil record so desperately needed to support Darwin’s Origin of Species, published two years beforehand. It has remained controversial ever since, even having been claimed to be a forgery by such luminaries as cosmologist Fred Hoyle in 1985, despite its superbly preserved intricacies and the existence at the time of 6 slightly different specimens from the same source some discovered long after Hoyle’s supposed master craftsman must have died. Creationists soon after the first discovery claimed it was simply a bird created on a Friday together with fish (Genesis 1:20) and must have predated dinosaurs by a day, as they were created on the 6th Day along with all the ‘cattle and creeping thing and beast of the earth’ (Genesis 1:24-31). That scurrilous sect will certainly leap gleefully on the new discovery of a feathered dinosaur from the ever productive Late Jurassic Tiaojishan Formation in NE China (Xu, X. et al.2011. An Archaeopteryx-like theropod from China and the origin of the Avialae. Nature, v. 475, p. 465-470) because ironically, by itself, it could be said to be a missing link too.” In fact, Xiaotingia zhengi possesses features very like those displayed by Archaeopteryx but convincingly close affinities to deinonychosaurian dinosaurs. The shared features show that neither is a bird (Avialae) and nor are they part of the clade that evolved to birds: they are part of the growing group of feathered dinosaurs that may well have glided or even flown. As Lawrence Witmer of Ohio University has observed (Witmer, L.M. 201. An icon knocked off its perch. Nature, v. 475, p. 458-459), ‘This finding is likely to be met with considerable controversy (if not outright horror)…’. Source:Earth Pages 6)More Fear of Creationists: Pssst! Don’t tell the creationists, but scientists don’t have a clue about how life began. John Horgan writing for Scientific American wanted to use that headline 20 years ago when writing about the sad state of science with respect to the origin of life but couldn’t get away with it then. See, science is absolutely certain that life didn’t begin as it is described in Genesis but unfortunately science has no satisfactory alternative explanation. Well actually, they have dozens of alternative, mutually exclusive alternative explanations for the origin of life. You’re not a scientist? Don’t know much about biology? How about life comes from life? Biogenesis, life from life is all anyone knows but science is sure by faith that abiogenesis; life from non-life somehow occurred. Mr. Horgan is letting us know from the inside that despite their assurance after many years no one has any idea how abiogenesis could have happened. In 2011 the famous primordial soup grew cold and was thrown out. In our own article on the topic (Life is a Killer Problem for Science –And Hope for Alien Life; Dies Again. Plus, Shhh, Don’t Tell The Creationists we identified dozens of competing theories for the origin of life. Source: Scientists Don’t Have a Clue How Life Began http://web.archive.org/web/20120329125448/http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2011/02/28/pssst-dont-tell-the-creationists-but-scientists-dont-have-a-clue-how-life-began/ 7) 80 Whales Buried Mysteriously in Chilean desert .. Shhh, Don’t tell the creationists? Marine graveyard is evidence for Noah’s Flood? by Tas Walker Published: 01 December 2011 “Researchers from the USA and Chile reported, in November 2011, a remarkable bone bed on the west coast of northern Chile near the port city of Caldera, about 700 kilometres (440 miles) north of the capital, Santiago. Excavations uncovered the remains of some 80 baleen whales of which more than 20 specimens were complete. They also found other kinds of marine mammals including an extinct dolphin with tusks and a sperm whale. The previous year, construction workers upgrading the Pan-American Highway discovered the fossil site in a road cut just north of Caldera. Since then, teams of scientists led by palaeontologist Nick Pyenson from the Smithsonian Institute and Mario Suarez from the nearby Museo Paleontologico de Caldera have been working to excavate the fossils while the road works were temporarily suspended. The fossils alongside the highway are confined to a sandstone ridge about 20 metres (70 feet) wide and 240 metres (800 feet) long. Most whales were about 8 metres (25 feet) long, and perfectly preserved. Some whales were so close together that they overlapped one another. The site in a corner of the Atacama Desert is now well above sea level and over a kilometre from the shore. Suarez said it was well known that whale bones jutted out of the ridge, which was given the name Cerro Ballena, or Whale Hill. Paleontologists were thrilled to find the treasure trove, describing it as “very unusual”. Pyenson thinks the whales all died “more or less at the same time” after they were trapped in a lagoon. Others suggest they became disoriented and beached themselves. Paleontologist Erich Fitzgerald from Museum Victoria in Australia said it’s possible the remains accumulated over thousands of years. Whale expert Hans Thewissen from Northeast Ohio Medical University thought the whales might have gathered in a lagoon and been stranded by an earthquake or storm. After the connection to the ocean closed, the lagoon dried up and the whales died. The puzzle of how these marine creatures died has caught news headlines with one reporting “Fossil Bonanza Poses Mystery”. Another asked, “How did 75 whales end up in the desert?” Interestingly, some of those posting comments on these news reports suggested the creatures perished in Noah’s Flood. Robert Raeburn of Western Australia said, “The whales probably swam there when the whole world was covered in water, about 4000 years ago at the time of Noah. They would then have been stranded when the waters assuaged (drained back) to expose the dry land. … This all makes sense when viewed from a ‘Bible’ perspective.” An email friend suggested the same to Mario Suarez, one of the lead paleontologists. Not surprisingly, this idea generated a deal of web comments. What stops people making the obvious connection between these fossils and Noah’s Flood? It’s the million-year ages assigned to the fossils. The field evidence for large-scale catastrophe is overwhelming as these research scientists have reported. What stops people making the obvious connection between these fossils and Noah’s Flood? It’s the million-year ages assigned to the fossils. On one comments thread Holly from the USA responded to the Noah’s Flood idea with, “Nothing from the Bible perspective makes sense, since 4,000 years ago that area wasn’t covered with water. However it was about 2 million years ago.” “ The remainder of the article and the source: Source http://web.archive.org/web/20120329125448/http://creation.com/chile-desert-whale-fossils 8)Everything that You thought you knew about dinosaurs is wrong! Again! Were dinosaurs cold or warm blooded? Bi pedal or quadrupedal? Did the hold their heads erect or down? Omnivore, carnivore or vegetarian? An article written in 2000 in Discover Magazine informs us that no one knows what dinosaurs looked like (except the people who saw them?) A 2009 article in LiveScience suggests that paleontologists have overestimated the girth of certain dinosaurs by as much as a third to a half-all this time. In 2009 also UC Berkeley paleontologist Mark Goodwin and his partner Jack Horner of the Museum of the Rockies concluded that many dinosaurs once thought to represent new or separate species may have been new or separate at all. A miniature creature known as Nanotyrannus, the recently discovered “tiny tyrant” that resembled the ferocious Tyrannosaurus rex, may have been nothing more than a juvenile version of the big dinosaur. And a giant headed, frill-necked creature that its discoverers called Torosaurus turns out to be only an old-age stage of the well-known plant-eating Triceratops. And Hogwartia, the famous dinosaur that looked like a dragon!!? Just a plain old Pachycephalosaurus! (What now will become of Chrisparkerosaurus!? Is the constant shuffling of dinosaurs and dinosaur identifications the result of scientists seeking personal glory or the results of a field, paleontology, which is to science what Denny’s is to haute cuisine? Yes! Elsewhere on Horner and Dinosaur Identification Problems: “Dinosaur Classification Is a Mess CreationevolutionHeadlines May 13, 2011 — Are there a thousand species of dinosaurs – or far fewer? John Horner, a dinosaur hunter himself, thinks the classification is a mess and wants to clean it up. According to Science Magazine News Horner is worried that “with almost 1000 types of dinosaurs on record and a new species being named somewhere in the world every 2 weeks—too many supposedly new discoveries are actually duplicates of animals already on the books.” Another paleontologist, Michael J. Benton, estimates that over half of the named dinosaurs are misclassified. Apparently human pride is to blame. “Part of the problem, Horner says, is that scientists are sometimes too keen on finding and naming new dinosaurs.” Naming a new dinosaur gets you noticed and published. As a result, fossil hunters tend to focus on the differences instead of the similarities. Additionally, “paleontologists are coming to realize that the bones of an adult dinosaur can be very different from those of a juvenile animal of the same species and can easily mislead scientists into thinking they are two different species.”..….CreationEvolutionHeadlines 9) Some “Non-Avian Feathered Dinosaurs” May Have Been Birds Oh, I see; some of your non sequential, ill-logical thoughts have been formed into words Did you follow that? Some “non-bird”, feathered dinosaurs, may have been birds? Science writer Jennifer Viegas in Discovery News summarizes a research paper which had been published in February 2009 Medical Hypotheses. What is a non-avian dinosaur? Or more to the point, why are certain of God’s creatures known broadly as non-avian dinosaurs? After all, aren’t all creatures either avians or non-avians? It’s because in the absence of that description people would think that they were birds! In order to support the evolutionists current dinosaur to bird mythology, however, science needs these birds to be dinosaurs. Suppose evolutionists had a mythology that t-rex’s evolved into dogs. Certain extremely dog-like fossils would be named; –non-dog-ian dinosaurs. (non-canine-dinosaurs)That way everyone would “know”. Source: Discovery News 10)Scientists Continue to Marvel at How Much the Universe is Fined Tuned for Human Life Existence: Why is the Universe Just Right for us? by Marcus Chown NewScientist, July 29, 2011 “IT HAS been called the Goldilocks paradox. If the strong nuclear force which glues atomic nuclei together were only a few per cent stronger than it is, stars like the sun would exhaust their hydrogen fuel in less than a second. Our sun would have exploded long ago and there would be no life on Earth. If the weak nuclear force were a few per cent weaker, the heavy elements that make up most of our world wouldn’t be here, and neither would you….(Chown) If gravity were a little weaker than it is, it would never have been able to crush the core of the sun sufficiently to ignite the nuclear reactions that create sunlight; a little stronger and, again, the sun would have burned all of its fuel billions of years ago. Once again, we could never have arisen. Such instances of the fine-tuning of the laws of physics seem to abound. Many of the essential parameters of nature – the strengths of fundamental forces and the masses of fundamental particles – seem fixed at values that are “just right” for life to emerge. A whisker either way and we would not be here. It is as if the universe was made for us. What are we to make of this? One possibility is that the universe was fine-tuned by a supreme being – God. Although many people like this explanation, scientists see no evidence that a supernatural entity is orchestrating the cosmos. (What! See Prior Paragraphs in this article, geniuses!…s8int.com) Source: NewScientist 11) The Continued Rehabilitation of New-anderthal “New investigations at an iconic cave site on the Channel Island of Jersey have led archaeologists to believe the Neanderthals have been widely under-estimated.” ..BBC UK Enough all ready! Several years ago a DNA study showed that Neanderthal DNA matched human DNA to 99.97%. You match your neighbor’s DNA to 99.99%. Jack Cuozzo, a dentist discovered that Neanderthals' reconstructions had been deliberately tricked up to push their faces forward in order to make their faces appear to be more apelike. Cuozzo Story: http://web.archive.org/web/20120329125448/http://s8int.com/sophis8.html But even though science is reporting these recent truths about Neanderthal; that he was fully human, apparently the message hasn’t penetrated the entire paleontological community. We get it. The truth is; we never thought otherwise and in fact creationists were there from the beginning–from Genesis. If it was me I’d start to get irritated if people kept making a big deal about how “fully human” I am…BBC News UK This site is for educational purposes only!! **FAIR USE** Copyright Disclaimer under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.

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